Twitter Gets Rid Of Stolen Joke Tweets

Trending News: Twitter Now Deleting Stolen Jokes

Why Is This Important?

Because nobody likes a joke thief.

Long Story Short

You can’t just go and steal someone else’s tweet and post it as your own. If Twitter gets a complaint, they’ll take it down.

Long Story

Technically Twitter has promised to withhold copyright-infringing tweets upon request since 2012, but with such a flurry of tweets and requests coming through the wires they haven’t been perfect. This weekend however, a freelance writer convinced Twitter to take down tweets from joke thieves who just copied her joke to get more followers.

As reported by The Verge, @runolgarun tweeted “saw someone spill their high end juice cleanse all over the sidewalk and now I know god is on my side.” A week later, Twitter got around to withholding the tweets, as initially seen by @PlagiarismBad.

BREAKING NEWS: Twitter is hiding tweets reported stolen. And it's referring to the author as a "copyright holder" pic.twitter.com/DkteWMZ7zg

Olga Lexell, the owner of the original tweet, said on Twitter that she’d asked to have the stolen jokes removed because the jokes are her intellectual property.

"I simply explained to Twitter that as a freelance writer I make my living writing jokes (and I use some of my tweets to test out jokes in my other writing)," she wrote, according to The Verge. "I then explained that as such, the jokes are my intellectual property, and that the users in question did not have my permission to repost them without giving me credit."

Since the story came out, a bunch of rebel rousers have been testing Twitter’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act system by reposting the joke and some have been able to get away with it.

I wonder, if you spelled high-end with a hyphen, would Twitter still be able to take your joke down…

Regardless, I think we can agree that stopping this kind of follower-mining behavior is a good thing. The least you could do is put a RT or a couple quotation marks.

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